By Francis Booth | On August 30, 2022 | Updated August 31, 2022 | Comments (0)
This introduction to the life of Lucia Joyce, a professional dancer and the talented, troubled daughter of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle is excerpted from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses, wrote in Shakespeare and Company about James Joyce’s family:
“I was very fond of them all: Giorgio, with his gruffness, hiding or trying to hide his feelings; Lucia, the humorous one – neither of them happy in the strange circumstances in which they grow up; and Nora, the wife and mother, who scolded them all, including her husband, for their shiftlessness.” Read More→
By Jasmin Darznik | On March 24, 2022 | Updated August 21, 2022 | Comments (0)
By 1918, the year Dorothea Lange arrived in San Francisco, trailblazing photographers Imogen Cunningham, Anne Brigman, and Consuelo Kanaga were busy doing phenomenal work there. They were Bohemians, bent on living their lives on their own terms.
San Francisco in the 1920s was a fantastically exciting place for women artists. The 1906 Earthquake and Fires had displaced the photography establishment, which wound up creating opportunities for women. Lange was able to find friends, colleagues, and mentors. This community emboldened and transformed her.
Jasmin Darznik, author of The Bohemians, a novel of Dorothea Lange’s early career (Ballantine Books, 2021), introduces our readers to this trailblazing American documentary photographer of the early 20th century, and those in her circle. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On February 21, 2022 | Updated April 12, 2022 | Comments (0)
Alice Guy-Blaché (July 1, 1873 – March 24, 1968) was a pioneering filmmaker of the early days of cinema, and the first woman to direct a film. One of the first filmmakers to make a narrative film, she was the only known female filmmaker in the world from 1896 to 1906.
Guy-Blaché directed, produced, or supervised about a thousand films, many of them short. When she died in 1968, many of her accomplishments had been erased from male-dominated film history books, but recent years have seen a revival of interest in her life and work. Read More→
By Lori McMullen | On July 4, 2021 | Updated March 3, 2023 | Comments (0)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) was an American writer and environmentalist who famously fought to protect the Florida Everglades, and also used her talents to advocate for women’s rights and racial justice in Miami and beyond. Here you’ll discover 10 fascinating facts about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose multifaceted accomplishments shouldn’t be forgotten.
Marjory’s long life was full of adventure, heartbreak, loss, discovery, and – ultimately – impact on the health and preservation of the wetlands critical to South Florida’s survival.
This unconventional woman helped shape the future of South Florida at a time when Miami was barely more than a frontier town and the “swamp” to the west of it was considered there for the taking by developers, speculators, and agricultural industrialists. Read More→
By Francis Booth | On May 30, 2021 | Updated August 5, 2024 | Comments (0)
Sylvia Beach (1887 – 1962) was the legendary owner of the legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company the meeting place for all of literary Paris in the 1920s, and the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922.
Excerpted from Everybody I Can Think Of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
Beach wrote her own résumé towards the end of her life in a letter dated April 23, 1951, to the American Library in post-war Paris, when she donated the remaining books from Shakespeare and Company to them. Read More→
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